When Sherlock Was: Age 5
by MedicOnDuty
Summary: When Sherlock was note quite four years old, he noticed something very odd about his nanny: most of the day, she'd sit in the rocking chair in his room, and read. Sherlock deduced that there was something between the covers of a book that was worth knowing, and he decided he needed to find out for himself what it was. Second in a series of vignettes about Sherlock growing up.


By the time little Sherlock Holmes was five years old, he'd become a voracious reader. He'd already made it nearly one quarter of the way through all of the books in his parents' extensive collection, which was housed in the Library. The Library was a large, rectangular room on the first story of the Holmes mansion. It had a set of heavy wooden doors leading into the hallway on one end, and tall windows hung with dark green curtains on the other. Each side of the room was flanked by floor-to-ceiling book cases which were built into the walls to withstand the weight of the many books they carried, and a singular mahogany desk with a traditional green, hooded desk lamp stood centered in front of the windows. A chandelier hung over the very center of the room, casting an ambient, yellowish light, and directly below it stood a grouping of four matching leather arm chairs, each accompanied by a small, round table and its own reading lamp. It was here that Sherlock had taken to spend most of his time, among the musty smell of old tomes and the crisp, new pages of recently-released books.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sherlock's love for books did not originate with any member of the Holmes family, although all of them were well-read and often found in the company of a good book. His mother, a mathematician, had penned several books herself, in addition to a slew of articles published in scientific magazines. Mycroft, Sherlock's older brother, had started his own library, which now occupied four shelves in his bedroom, and included his school books (including those from years past) and additional reading, which consisted largely of books for the years at school he had yet to take. Mycroft liked to be practical and prepared – to the point that he would have given the average university student a run for his money in terms of knowledge by the time he was twelve.

But no, Sherlock's love of books originated from the most unlikely of sources: Amelie Moreau, his nanny. The Holmes family had hired her when Sherlock was born, with the understanding that she would be kept on until the boy was old enough to go to boarding school, and she had cared for him ever since. That is to say, she ensured that he got up and dressed in the morning, ate three meals and a healthy snack each day, went for walks in the gardens, didn't annoy his brother, and went to bed at a reasonable hour. She showed little interest in Sherlock himself, particularly when it came to his stories and observations, which he had been trying to share with her ever since he'd learned to speak. She'd learned to just not and yes at enough of the right places to keep him entertained and to ensure he wouldn't complain to his parents. She barely kept an eye on him as he played with his toys or went to bother his brother. However, there was one thing she did that intrigued Sherlock: she read. Amelie spent a large portion of each day in the rocking chair in Sherlock's room, her face hidden behind one of many small, dog-eared paperback novels that commonly featured swooning maidens and shirtless heroes on the covers.

When Sherlock was just a few months shy of four years old, he'd first noticed her peculiar behavior, and he'd observed her intently for a few days as she read her way through several books. At first, he didn't understand why anyone would want to spend the whole day sitting in a rocking chair with their nose in a book that didn't even have pictures. But he noticed that reading caused something strange to happen to Amelie: it caused her to change her emotions seemingly without any kind of cause or reasoning. Sometimes she'd flush. Other times she'd giggle. Then, at some pages, she would gasp. And sometimes she'd even wipe at a tear that had appeared in the corner of her eye. Sherlock deduced that there was something between the two covers of a book that made people feel all of these emotions, something that was worth the effort of reading, and he wanted to know exactly what that was. So, just before his fourth birthday, he began begging Amelie to teach him how to read. Since this was the one thing she both enjoyed and was good at, she agreed.

Mycroft had kept every single one of his old school books, which included three different alphabet books and an assortment of small storybooks for beginning readers. He agreed, after some considerable prodding from Amelie and his parents, that he would let Sherlock have them, but only under the condition that his baby brother would _stop bothering him already with his constant annoying requests to play._ His argument was simple: he was seven years older than his baby brother, which meant he was very nearly a teenager and shouldn't be subjected to a toddler bothering him all the time, especially when he needed to focus on school work. Their parents had agreed that this was a reasonable request to make, but had ultimately left the choice up to Sherlock, which Mycroft thought was wildly unfair and more than just a little ridiculous. For the first time in his life, Sherlock had stopped to really ponder the consequences of his decision. Getting those books meant having the keys to a whole new world that was yet closed to him. On the other hand, agreeing meant that he wasn't allowed to ask his brother to play anymore. For Sherlock, who was desperate for both his brother's attention and affection, it was an agonizing decision to make. In the end, Sherlock decided that whatever it was that could be found inside a book, it had to be better than each afternoon he spent sitting in the hallway outside of Mycroft's bedroom, hoping that the brother he adored would pay him some sort of attention that did not involve the words "go away" or having a door shut in his face, and he agreed to the deal.

Sherlock proved to be a quick learner and it took him very little time to learn the individual letters, then how to sound out simple words, and then how to read and understand even the complicated, long words. Once he'd finished learning _how _to read, he began reading his way through the rest of Mycroft's old books, and by the time he'd turned five, he'd begun making his way through the books in his parents' library. On most days, Sherlock would get out of bed, dress, have breakfast, and then make his way into the Library where he'd spend most of the day nestled in one of the big armchairs, a book propped open on his pale, skinny knees. This made his parents happy because he was learning, and it made Amelie happy because her job just got so much easier, not having to make sure Sherlock wasn't bothering his brother and not having to put up with his stories and his vying for her attention.

It also made Sherlock happy. He hadn't just learned to read, he'd found out that there were entire worlds between the two covers of a book that were just waiting to be discovered, and he learned something new and different from each and every one of them. He especially loved how many different types of books were out there and how each of them offered something different. Sherlock read the _Oxford Dictionary _with a great deal of excitement, reveling in the pleasure that came from acquiring new words, which meant he was able to understand more of the other texts he read. He read every large, leather-bound volume of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, and found that he wanted to know more about many of the subjects that were so briefly summarized on those pages. He read a book on Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which was boring, and then a book on learning German, which was difficult. (Amelie thought German was an awful, guttural language and tried steering him toward learning _her_ native tongue, French, with mixed results.) He read Goethe's _Erlking_ in English and then, for good measure, he also read the original German text. That was the same week he discovered a thick, leather-bound volume with stories about pirates and privateers that had been his father's when his father had been Mycroft's age. In it, Sherlock read about a female Chinese pirate named Ching Shih, who intrigued him because he'd never realized that there could be such a thing as a girl pirate. ("What an awful thing for a girl to be," said Amelie in disapproval.) He also read about two Ottoman brothers who were both known as _Barbarossa_, Redbeard. As soon as Sherlock had finished that book and realized it was the only pirate book in the entire Library, he began asking his parents to buy him additional books about pirates, especially about the Barbarossa brothers' adventures.

Of course, Sherlock was secretly desperate to have his own adventures with his own brother, but in the absence of being able to have real adventures, the pirate stories were the next best thing. Still, even at only five years old, Sherlock often found himself siting on the cushions that lined the sill of the bay window in his bedroom, looking down over the lawn and into the woods, and feeling that his life was the most dull and lonely in all of existence. He wished that he could sail the seven seas like the pirates in his stories, raid enemy ships with his fearless crew, and keep a secret cache of his plundered treasures on a secret island to which only he knew the coordinates. He tried keeping a secret cache of table silver underneath his bed, but was quickly discovered after the butler saw him run off with a dinner fork shoved down the back of his trousers. The whole debacle ended in a week without desserts and a stern lecture on stealing.

At night, after he was supposed to have gone to sleep, Sherlock would get out of bed, sit in the windowsill, and pretend he was navigating the ocean using only his trusty sextant. (He'd read about celestial navigation in a book on sailing.) During the days, when he'd finished a chapter or needed to blow off some steam, he often ran around the mansion brandishing a stick he'd picked up in the forest, pretending that it was a rapier (he'd read about them in a book on fencing) and that he was battling other pirates. It was during one of those battles that Sherlock dashed around a corner, flourishing his stick-rapier, and very nearly stabbed Mycroft straight in the eye in the process. He did manage to give Mycroft a welt on the cheek, which had turned a delicate shade of purple by the next morning, and Sherlock found himself without a stick, as Mycroft had broken it in half.

On the whole, Mycroft thought that Sherlock's aspiration of becoming a pirate captain was hilarious. "Some pirate," he sneered. "Five years old, pale as a sheet, and with that mop of ridiculous curls!" He also suggested that Sherlock might want to consider just walking the plank before getting any further into his ridiculous dreams of being a pirate. For one, that would be Sherlock's inevitable end, at any rate, and in addition, it could also reasonably be accomplished right here at home, if they could only turn up a suitable plank. (Mycroft wasn't able to sneak a plank from the gardener's shed, although he tried.)

Sherlock eventually broached the subject of his future pirate captaincy with his parents over dinner one night, when he was begging for additional pirate books again. His mother had nodded and yessed him without even looking up from the science magazine she was reading, and then suggested he needed to finish his broccoli or he couldn't have any pudding. Sherlock's father was more inclined to listen, although he very much listened in the way parents do when they are simply humoring their young children's ridiculous fantasies. That night, Sherlock overheard his parents have a lengthy discussion behind a half-closed study door. The discussion included several uses of the phrase, "needs to get out more," and "too much time reading." It also resulted in something more useful than a debate over books: Sherlock got his very first real friend, an Irish setter he immediately christened Redbeard.


End file.
